Elegy and history are cousins

 
Elegy and history are cousins, she explains, because they’re both forms of autopsy.

Lamentation 

Anne Carson, NOX

 
 I began a letter, as if to a dead friend, or perhaps the preliminary notes for a novel.
—
He will have out his notebook; under D, he will enter “Phrases to be used on the deaths of friends.”
—
I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend.

Actual Thrills
Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd | Virginia Woolf, The Waves | Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

waiting

elisabeth-reidy:

Marie Howe, “The Gate” in What the Living Do

shape dissent from light

Burn

The wind then, through seams of bluestem,
or switchgrass swayed by a coyote’s passing.

Where the fabric gapes, Barthes said,
lies the sensual. A prairie cut

by winding seeps, or winds or shearing wings.
Mare’s tails, mackerels, cirrus,

distance dispersed as light. Under a buzzard’s bank
and spiral the prairie folds and unfolds.

Here between the stands of bluestem, I am interruption.
I rake my fingers over culms and panicles.

Here seeds burr into my sleeves, spur each hem.
In a prairie, I am chance. I am rupture. The wind—

thief, ruffian, quick-fingered sky, snatches a kink
of my hair. The broken nap falls, wound round

like a prairie snake, a coil of barbed wire, a snare
for the unwary. In the fall, volunteer naturalists

will wrench invading roots and scour grassy densities
with fire. Wick, knot, gnarl, my kindled hair

will flare, burn, soften into ash, ash that will settle,
sieve through soil, compost for roots to suck

and worms to cast out, out into the loess that raises
redtop, turkeyfoot, sideoats grama,

and all the darkened progenies of grass
that reach and strive and shape dissent from light.

Janice N. Harrington

image:

seabois:
Testament of Youth (2014)